Later, years later, when nobody was thinking of the moon, the orphans from Vietnam arrived. To a baby, presumably, being picked up by giants and put down in one place seems no more arbitrary than being picked up by other giants and put down in another place entirely. Here they were. A family named Cavanaugh or something was being interviewed about its newest member, the infant Kim Su Cavanaugh, who was already fast asleep beside her teddy bear. The adult Cavanaughs, particularly Mrs. Cavanaugh, kept burbling about how happy they were. Asked how she felt, Mrs. Cavanaugh said happy, many times. Then the Cavanaugh children were interviewed. The youngest Cavanaugh, a seven-year-old, who looked particularly miserable and embittered, was asked how she felt to have a baby sister now. “Happy,” she said. The reporter asked whether there was anything she hoped to do with her baby sister. Her face became frightening. In what was still a baby voice, she said “No.” The reporter, happily insistent, asked whether there was anything she would like to teach her baby sister. The face contorted with thought for a moment; then she said, in her baby voice, very slowly, “Monopoly.”
I am normally the sort of reporter who hangs around, or rather, tags along. I have never been any good at interviews. The first man I was ever sent to interview was an English actor, middle-aged, successful, easy, talkative. I went, with my notebook, to see him backstage after his play, which was a hit. I was introduced to him. He said Hello. I said Hello, how are you? It was the last question I could think of to ask. He managed to talk for quite some time. He said he was fine. He went on with an anecdote, in a little monologue. When he came to a pause and seemed about to falter, I tried repeating the last few words he had said, with a little interrogative inflection at the end. “Little interrogative inflection at the end?” I would say, if he had just said that. That worked all right. I would repeat what he’d said, as a question. Yes, he would say, and start out on another little monologue. He was not a reticent or a shy man. A boring man, in a way, but not at all shy. In the end, I was getting him down. Only a half-hour had passed. The actor’s words were slowing, limping; one could hear his verbal engine cough. He smiled. He started up again. “You know,” he said, heartily, “I’m very eager to get back to England.” Pause. “To see my two sons.” He looked at me, encouragingly. I tried. “You have two sons?” I said. “Yes,” he said. He was not going any further. I tried again. I tried to look moved. I scribbled in my notebook. “Two,” I said. “Sons.” He said, “Tell me, Miss Fain. Are you a professional reporter?” Well, I am. I’m the sort who tags along, that’s all.
Mattie Stokes, who is black and from Trinidad, grew up in Rochester and was sent through college by Xerox. She became a systems analyst, taught nights at the New School, and was the assistant to a radical Fordham dean. She was living in Bedford-Stuyvesant when I first went to see her. I was writing about blacks in the city universities. There were hardly any. Mattie’s rooms were in an elegant townhouse of the sort that still exists in the middle of Brooklyn’s hardest criminal warrens. It was cold. The landlord was trying to drive the tenants out. Ninety slum tenants in a given space at the going rate per yard is more profitable than twelve bourgeois tenants, even at high rents. So it was cold. The radiators were off, the hot water was off, the boiler was off. Everything was off. Friends kept wandering into Mattie’s apartment to talk about legal matters. Everyone was drinking beer. I drank beer. I tried to look as though I knew what I was doing there. “Are you here for an interview,” Mattie finally said, “or are you going to sit there like death on a soda cracker?” We became friends, of course.
The reporter had arrived at the catastrophe without his notebook. He wrote down everything he could on the backs of blank checks. Long after midnight, when he had finished phoning in his story, he stopped, on his way home, at the neighborhood liquor store. He bought Scotch. He asked the clerk, who knew him well, to add on ten dollars cash; he made out his check for the total. “My, my, what’s this?” the clerk said, as he started to put the check in the cash register. “I can’t cash this check. There’s endorsements or something all over the back.” The reporter mumbled wearily that they were story notes, that they were on the backs of all his checks that night. “Gosh,” the clerk said, when he had gotten the check approved by the owner of the liquor store. The owner added, “You must have been in a poetic mood.”
Mattie was married in those days to a man who was, in effect, her brother-in-law. Mattie’s youngest sister, who worked in Manhattan, was still a citizen of Trinidad. She had met a Jamaican newspaper reporter. They wanted to marry. Mattie was a U.S. citizen. She married him. He went straight from the wedding to live with Mattie’s sister, which was the idea. Some months after I met Mattie, this brother-in-law became a fugitive from justice. This husband, really, since they had never bothered to divorce. Mattie was by this time planning to be seriously married, to the lawyer who took over her building’s tenants’ case. There she was, married to a fugitive from justice. Within weeks, he was on the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted List. Mattie pretended to be bitterly pleased by this development. If the F.B.I. managed to find him, she would be able to find him, to arrange for divorce. Everyone who had known him had thought of him, anyway, as married to Mattie’s sister. The sister hadn’t liked him or seen him in years.
A problem with the F.B.I.’s Most Wanted List, however, is that, like the Bureau itself, it is designed to trace criminals who look a certain way. A glower, a scar, a tattoo, a maniacal stare, but a plain white male criminal way. When it comes to blacks, or to white students gone underground from campuses, the Bureau just can’t find them, or, more specifically, can’t tell them apart. Can’t tell the blacks apart. Can’t tell the loose, straight-haired college girls apart. It is a source of great embarrassment. Finding Dohrn, Alpert, Boudin, or even Hearst, when other people are constantly seeing them, is just not what these men are good at. Only last week, the Bureau announced that one of those fugitive girls might be “feigning pregnancy.” It struck me as a strange idea of what constitutes disguise. Whiskers, I would have thought, yes. Sunglasses even, a wig; but pregnancy, no. Jim says I misunderstood what the Bureau meant. The “feigned pregnancy” was considered, not as a disguise, but as a means of getting people not to shoot. I don’t know. Anyway, though they did find those California fugitives, in their purple jogging shorts, Mattie’s brother-in-law, so far as is known, has not even been seen.
Seven years ago, I bought a rifle. When I took it home from the sporting-goods store, I found in the box, not the fully assembled thing, which I had weighed, and tested, and shot, but two pieces — one, almost the whole rifle; the other, a little firing mechanism that had to be attached to it. There was also a little pamphlet, with a half page of instructions for putting the rifle together, six pages of instructions for joining the National Rifle Association. I could have figured out how to join the N.R.A. without those instructions, particularly since the pamphlet included an application for membership. But I could not, no matter how slowly or how often I read that first half page, or at what hour of the day, understand how to attach the firing mechanism to the other part. Anyone can do it. Any child who hunts squirrel, any hunter who cannot read without running his finger along under the words, any psychotic halfwit who wants to shoot some stranger through the head. I could not fathom the problem in any way.